Eugene mayor meets with Dalai Lama, visits sister city

Presenter: The mayor of Eugene shared news about her recent trip to our first sister city, Kathmandu. March 9, Mayor Kaarin Knudson: 

Mayor Kaarin Knudson: Last week I completed a sister-city delegation trip to Kathmandu, which is our oldest sister-city relationship in the city of Eugene. And we celebrated the 50th anniversary of this Eugene-Kathmandu Sister City Association. It was first established in 1975.

During this trip, I met with Kathmandu’s Mayor Sunita Dangol, and toured multiple UNESCO sites and city facilities with the city of Kathmandu’s finance, international relations, and administrative staff.

And during this trip I also had the opportunity to meet with local NGO leaders who are working to support education reform at the elementary and high school levels in Kathmandu in Nepal.

They also care a lot about early literacy in Kathmandu and Nepal, and I had the opportunity to meet with Nepali citizens who have volunteered as part of our Eugene-Kathmandu Sister City Association here in Eugene.

Much more to share and there will be other opportunities to share more about this trip.

But as a final note, I want to offer that before departing, I had the good fortune of meeting with some of our UO scientists and our community at the Zebrafish International Resource (Center) facility, ZIRC, right here in Eugene.

And at that meeting and before I learned about the critical role that zebrafish have in understanding fundamental biological processes and genetic research and how important this area of work is to international genetics research and life sciences research.

So what do these tiny fish have to do with Kathmandu? Well, as was explained to me by one of our local brilliant biology professors, about 70% of protein coating in human genes have counterparts in the zebrafish genome, and 84% of human disease associated genes have a corresponding gene in the zebrafish. 

This makes these little tiny fish incredibly useful as a vertebrate model for studying all sorts of questions that we have in the 21st century about ourselves and about science. And I want to especially thank our local community here for reaching out and sharing that incredible connection with me before departing on this trip.

Eugene and the University of Oregon are the scientific home of the zebrafish thanks to Dr. George Streisinger, who found this little fish and its connections to our genetic code several decades ago.

But Nepal is one of the few places on earth where these fish live in the wild. And so I look forward to future engagements and continuing to nurture relationships that support meaningful cultural exchange and learning, and that also can nurture such a remarkable connection between nature and science in our two cities.

Lastly, I want to offer the other background and the other proclamation related to this trip, is that in the days before we traveled to Kathmandu, I was honored to have an audience with His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama in Dharamshala, India, where the Tibetan government is in exile.

Recognizing the many decades that His Holiness has dedicated to the work of human rights and non-violence—he is now 91 years old, 92 if you’re using the Tibetan calendar—I presented a proclamation honoring His Holiness with international leadership and human rights award.

And I was truly honored to have the opportunity to share our community’s appreciation for one of the great moral leaders of this past 100 years, particularly at a time and a very pointed moment in time when leadership in human rights, nonviolence, compassion, and global peace is so clearly and importantly the place for us to put our attention.

So I want to thank especially our sister city program, which is dedicated to promoting peace, fostering friendship, and encouraging cultural understanding and international cooperation through people-to-people diplomacy, and thank our local Eugene-Kathmandu Sister City Association volunteers and the volunteers who support our sister-city relationships with Jinju, South Korea and Kakagawa, Japan, which are active as well.

Presenter: Mayor Kaarin Knudson and a delegation from Eugene visit our sister city in Nepal to spread a message of peace.

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.